Is Sony Ericsson Xperia Play the PlayStation phone we've been waiting for?

A few days have passed since we first
got our hands on the Sony Ericsson Xperia PLAY, the first
PlayStation-certified phone, and now
it's time to draw some conclusions. Is the Xperia PLAY really worth
the hefty price tag? Does it really boost gaming? Or is the gamepad
just a cheap trick? We took a dive in quite a few virtual worlds and
here's what we found:

PlayStation phone
exclusive

First, we
bravely dissected all... six Xperia PLAY exclusive titles
only to find what you might have already expected – the gamepad
really makes a huge difference here. While your selection of games is
very limited, the whole experience comes close to that on an original
PlayStation (save for the screen size) and is certainly worth
admiration. The unobstructed screen combined with the convenience of
having the time-proven PS controls might lead to a serious addiction.
If more games come out, that is.

Other titles

Android
is far from being as robust in terms of gaming titles as iOS, but it
still offers some excellent games. You've – of course – heard of Angry Birds,
Fruit Ninja and Doodle Jump, all of which rely on touchscreen actions
or the accelerometer. If this kind of gaming is all you really care
about, the gamepad would seem like hefty and unnecessary bulk added
to the phone as it's absolutely useless with those titles.

Some
graphically taxing phone titles like Asphalt
6 (gaming demo here),
though, make excellent use of the additional controls. You'll feel a
noticeable improvement in your driving from the get-go, while the 4
inches of screen estate seem all the more spacious when you have your
fingers out of the way. But motion sensing controls do pretty much
the same job. It's titles like the Bruce Lee
fighting game or
Fifa 10 that truly
prove the use of gamepad controls – pumping out combos on with the
instant physical feedback giving you a precise idea of timing is just
incomparable to anything else out there. The same goes for emulators
– we gave Cadillacs and
Dinosaursa quick spin,
which suddenly turned out in a full-fledged hourly gaming session.
It's that addictive.

With your fingers out of the way, you can concentrate on the whole screen

For the rest, we were left with mixed
feelings as the gamepad does make a difference for hardcore
gaming, but if you only plan on
spending a couple of minutes here and there to fill in the time with
some Angry Birds action, you'll find no good use for it.

Actually,
it all comes down to the game genre – first
person shooters, sports simulators and emulators are
some that fit well the idea of having the slide-out controller; other
genres, like racing games, are just as fun – if not more – with
their motion-sensitive controls, while the rest of the classical
Android gaming roster is not even optimized for the gamepad. Finally,
the Sony Ericsson Xperia PLAY might not bring breath-taking silicon,
nor the long list of exclusive premium titles we all expected, but
what it does is put the focus on cell phone gaming and that's what
really intrigues us. It's all that PlayStation stalwarts ever wanted
in a phone, but for everyone else, the Xperia PLAY is mostly a
promise. A rosy one, but still a promise rather than a full-baked
platform.

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Honestly I wouldn't have cared if they didn't make any games exclusive for this. I have the gbc, gba, nes, snes, ps1,n64, genesis and arcade emulators on my droid x and as soon as I get this im gonna go crazy.

3.Fruit_of_the_doom (unregistered)

ugh.. my iphone is more playstation than xperia play.. dead space, dead rising, devil may cry,resident evil, dungeon hunter, call of duty.. you name it! all high quality games just for iphone.. o well still waiting for NGP

4.harbinger (unregistered)

Sony will sell lots of these but doubt they will sell many games. Android users are too spoiled by playing free Emu games and free cracked APKs. Nobody buys anything on Android market and even the best games released on Market and iOS the Apple one out sells the Android game anyday even though Android has a larger marketshare it is mostly cheapskates that got the free phones and want free stuff and never wants to pay for anything.

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